


The Only One Left

by protectoroffaeries



Category: Skulduggery Pleasant - Derek Landy
Genre: I just wanted to put some of my own headcanons out there, I've read a lot of fics about Skulduggery's wife and child, Post DOTL, Some insight into Skully's past, the war - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 22:24:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7124698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/protectoroffaeries/pseuds/protectoroffaeries
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Valkyrie is curious about Skulduggery's family. She tracks down a supposed relative of his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only One Left

**Author's Note:**

> I know, I know. High School AU. I'm meant to be writing that. I'll do it in a minute, I promise
> 
> In the meantime, enjoy an OC with a unique perspective.

Valkyrie found her in the spring, but they couldn’t meet until summer. The woman lived in the United States, and she was a school teacher. She promised to come to Ireland once the school year was up and wouldn’t take Valkyrie’s suggestion that she just pop over via teleporter for the day. 

It was hot the day they met, though they got together about 9 o’clock in the morning. Valkyrie took the Oompa Loompa, which Skulduggery had kept for her during her five years of self imposed exile and happily returned to her when she arrived back in Ireland, and drove to the address the woman had provided her. 

The woman’s name was - as far as Valkyrie could tell - Alicia Night. That was what her informants, a few older mages, including Cassandra Pharos, had called the woman when Valkyrie started asking. It wasn’t, however, the name the woman used now. Valkyrie had found her under the alias Morgan O’Hara. 

Valkyrie didn’t know much more than that. Her informants had all been vague. They had claimed not to know much about Ms. Alicia Night, nothing more than a few stories and her name. But she was, apparently, a relative of Skulduggery’s - no one had been clear on the relation - and that was what Valkyrie was looking for. She wanted to know some things about Skulduggery, about who he was before the war, before his death. It was, believe it or not, easier to spend six months tracking down a ghost of a woman behind his back than to risk breaking the tentative companionship they were just rebuilding now that she’d returned. 

The address that Ms. Night had given Valkyrie was that of a crumbling mansion. It looked to be at least three hundred years old by the looks of such outdated architecture and the state of decay it was in. Windows smashed, bricks turned to rubble, wooden doors rotted. It hunched, lonely on the countryside road, like an old man who just wouldn’t die. 

Valkyrie parked her car in the front yard, which was a generous term for what was really an overgrown mess of weeds. She got out cautiously, curling a bundle of white lightning around her fingers. She crept around the house, wondering if she was expected to go inside and what the likelihood of this all being some sort of trap was. 

When she made it to the back of the house, though, she saw a figure standing by a lone tree. The figure - presumably Ms. Alicia Night - wasn’t terribly far away, but her face was obscured by the tree’s shadow. Valkyrie also noticed that there were a couple large stones protruding from the ground next to the tree. Stones, she quickly concluded, that marked graves. 

“Ms. Night,” Valkyrie said as she approached. 

“No one has called me that in years,” said the woman. She seemed to be staring at the graves and didn’t shift her gaze in the slightest as Valkyrie walked up beside her.

Once she was under the tree with Ms. Night, she could make out the woman’s features a bit better. She had green eyes, though Valkyrie couldn’t tell if they were a dark green or if they just looked that way because of the lighting, and her brown hair was styled as a pixie cut. Valkyrie couldn’t help but notice that she seemed in better shape than the school teachers Valkyrie remembered from her youth. If Valkyrie didn’t know better, she would say the woman looked to be in her late thirties or early forties. She wore a dark t-shirt and jeans despite the heat of the day, and a black ribbon, one that was tight to the flesh of her neck, in the style of a choker, with a black stone attached to it. 

Valkyrie’s eyes narrowed as they landed on the dark adornment. The shadows, she noticed, seemed to coil lazily around it as if they were warm breaths in cold air. “You’re a Necromancer.”

Ms. Night sighed heavily. She looked away from the graves. “Miss Cain,” she said. “You wished to speak to me about Skulduggery Pleasant, not about my magic, is that right?”

“Well, now that I know what your magic is,” Valkyrie said, “I have a few questions about that, too.”

“I am a Necromancer, among other things. But I was not raised in a Temple. I’m merely a blasphemer that got ahold of some secrets by accident. At least, that was the last version of the story I heard.”

“And the truth?”

Ms. Night smiled, a small upturn of the lips. “It wasn’t an accident.”

Valkyrie considered asking her to elaborate, but decided that finding out about Skulduggery was more pressing than Ms. Night’s past with Necromancers. 

“Some other sorcerers told me that you were related to Skulduggery… somehow.”

Ms. Night blinked, like she wasn’t expecting Valkyrie to say such a thing, and then laughed. Valkyrie scowled. Maybe she had it all wrong. She didn’t like to be wrong.

“Yes. Somehow. He… before he died, he was my brother-in-law.”

Valkyrie sucked in a breath, a shocked inhale. She was expecting a cousin or some other more distant relative. Not someone who most likely had known Skulduggery, his wife, and his child so directly. 

“He’s never told me anything about his wife,” Valkyrie admitted. 

“Well,” Ms. Night said. “She’s right in front of you.” 

For a moment, Valkyrie was confused, but the confusion vanished as soon as she saw Ms. Night’s gester. She was motioning toward the graves she’d been staring at when Valkyrie arrived. 

Mala Fae  
11 March 1608 - 23 October 1700

There was no more on the gravestone, no mention of her being a wife or a sister or a mother, no prayers or bible verses, no old Irish sayings. It was unbelievably plain. Valkyrie had half-expected Skulduggery to have erected a monument to her. 

Valkyrie glanced at the other grave. She already knew who the other person was, though the name was a new to her. 

Theodore  
7 May 1692 - 23 October 1700

“He had a son,” Valkyrie said. For some reason, she’d always assumed that Skulduggery’s child was a little girl. Maybe it was the way he acted with her. Regardless, it looked as if she was wrong.

“Yes. We called him Theo. He was a little Skulduggery, in looks and personality.” Ms. Night gave a small chuckle. “Mala always joked that there was no doubt about who fathered her child.”

“Theo. I wouldn’t have guessed.”

“Mala picked his name. Named him after a poor boy that I fell in love with as a teenager,” Ms. Night said. “He helped my family when no one else would, and I suppose Mala named her son for  
him as a sort of tribute.”

Valkyrie looked down at the graves again. They, like the rest of the property, were left uncared for. Chipping, with weeds curling up about them. She wondered when the last time Skulduggery was here. 

“Can… would you… um, tell me about them?” Valkyrie asked as nicely as she could muster. “More, I mean.”

Ms. Night hesitated, but only for a moment. “Mala was twelve years younger than me, and twelve times as attractive,” she began. The line sounded, well, not necessarily rehearsed, but like it had been used before on many occasions. “We were the two children of a tense marriage - my father was an Irish noble, my mother, the youngest daughter of an English merchant. She was of the opinion that the Irish were barbaric.”

“My mother, besides being terribly high and mighty, also enjoyed liquor. Every memory I have of her is accompanied by a bottle. She died when I was sixteen, in a house fire. My father had left four years before, on the day of Mala’s birth. He wanted a son, you see, and apparently two chances to produce one was all he was willing to give my mother.”

“He waited twelve years just to see if she’d have another boy?”

“Well, in the meantime, he attempted to raise me as he would a son. He taught me to read and write, to ride, to fight. But I hit puberty at around twelve, and I think that was a signal to him that I could never be the man he wanted me to be.” 

“That’s stupid,” Valkyrie muttered. 

Ms. Night shrugged. “It was a different time.”

“So… who raised Mala, then? You?”

Ms. Night nodded. “It wasn’t easy. We were always terribly poor. There weren’t many savory jobs for women back then. But she was a bright girl, kind and happy. I always thought the universe would work things out in her favor. And… I thought it had when she introduced me to Skulduggery Pleasant. He’s an annoyingly charming bastard like that,” she conceided conversationally. 

“What did he look like?” Valkyrie asked on an impulse. 

Ms. Night considered her question. “He had cat eyes, that color that goes between gold and green. His hair was black… or dark brown, perhaps. And longer than socially acceptable, until the war began and he cut it.”

“Cat eyes. Of course.”

“They really did suit him,” agreed Ms. Night. “He was middle class, a great status boost for my sister. Not that his class was her reasoning for marrying him. She once turned down a rich suitor because he was being a douchebag. I was equally proud and pissed at her for that one.”

Hearing Ms. Night talk about her sister made Valkyrie think of her own Alice. She’d visited her parents and sister a few times since returning to Ireland, but she always felt guilty when she looked at the little girl. She’d grown so much, and Valkyrie had missed it.

“When they got married, Ghastly Bespoke and I were the only ones invited to the ceremony. It was a sweet and simple affair. Father didn’t approve, of course, but-”

“I thought you said your father left,” Valkyrie interrupted. 

Ms. Night nodded. “Yes, he did. I found him again in Dublin when I was in my forties. Causing trouble. Mala never paid him any mind, and he regarded her the same, but that didn’t stop him from insulting her in my presence. I love my father, but he was incredibly narrow minded.”

“So what, you reconciled with him?” Valkyrie asked with a frown.

“To an extent. For a small period of time. But… he killed Mala. I will never forgive him for that.”

“Nefarian Serpine killed them. Wait, you’re not saying-” Valkyrie shuddered at the thought of Serpine being anyone’s father, let alone the father of Skulduggery’s wife.

“Serpine was just a pawn. He didn’t do anything that Lord Mevolent didn’t authorize.”

Lord Mevolent.

“Mevolent was your father,” Valkyrie said aloud, hoping Ms. Night would deny it and explain something that Valkyrie missed.

“Yes,” she said instead. She didn’t say anything else.

**Author's Note:**

> Why did I give Skulduggery a son when everyone else gives him a daughter? Teenage rebellion, probably.


End file.
